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In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

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Re: In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

#61

Post by nate_meurer »

Gupie wrote: post #48
cdnsteve wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had $500M, the best move for the community would be to create a Hati community long term investment of 100M. The community gets the dividends/interest from the investments. Long term sustainability is automatically achieved. That's free money over the long term for clean water projects, community buildings, etc. Did Red Cross do that? Nope, people got tents and pocketed the rest.

>> people got tents and [the Red cross] pocketed the rest The red cross has a good accountability & transparency record: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary... But no doubt some of the money unavoidably got misplaced http://www.transparency.org/country#HTI

It appears you forgot to read the article. Charity Navigator has been using the same highly suspect numbers that the article analyses.

Click on the "news" tab on the CN page you cited, and you'll see that CN has put Red Cross on a "watch list" due to the recent reporting.

Re: In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

#62

Post by gjm11 »

nate_meurer wrote: post #53
bargl wrote: post #45

OH man this infuriates me. I’ve spent time volunteering in two different locations (Bolivia and Haiti), both were great experiences for me, but I only feel that my time in Bolivia really benifited the people there in the long term. I spent about three months on the ground in Haiti after the earthquake. I wasn’t a first responder or anything, I actually arrived 6 months after the earthquake, so most of the emergency r…

I can tell you have rich experience and strong opinions, but your writing is so unclear I can't understand what you're saying. I have a vague idea which of your experiences (Haiti or Bolivia) was positive and which was negative, but the reasons are unclear. Would you be able to clarify a bit?

I take it bargl is saying this:

That Bolivia was positive, because the interventions there actually worked. (E.g., developing local education to a point at which American volunteers are no longer needed.) Haiti wasn't because they didn't.

That the underlying reason why the interventions in Bolivia worked better than the ones in Haiti was because in Bolivia they treated the people they were helping with more respect -- working for and with rather than on them, and providing them with things they actually want rather than (e.g.) compressed-board houses that feel like temporary stopgaps.

Re: In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

#63

Post by onion2k »

sopooneo wrote: post #57
avar wrote: post #16

The biggest revelation to me in that article, which I feel should be highlighted more, is that the Red Cross provides almost zero information about how it spends its money. It refuses to provide more than very vague information about how the money was spent in Haiti (information like "35% of $488 million on shelters"), with no specific details about what projects they spent the money on, how those projects went etc.…

Could it be that actually getting things done in horrible environments requires interacting with, and paying off, some shady people? This is of course a charitable guess, but could it be that the Red Cross has made a decision to make morally questionable choices in the short term in support of the greater good, and they know they can't publish such truths and continue to exist?

If the only way they can exist is by doing things so morally reprehensible that they have to keep everyone ignorant of their actions then they shouldn't exist.

Re: In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

#65

Post by shkkmo »

pvaldes wrote: post #52

" The original plan was to build 700 new homes with living rooms and bathrooms. The Red Cross says it ran into problems acquiring land rights. Their internal memos, show there were other serious problems, including multiple staffing changes and long bureaucratic delays. And then there was a period of almost a year when the whole project appears to have sat dormant. " Haiti people was claimed as one of the worsts enem…

I am sure there were lots of problems and issues providing relief in Haiti.

The problem here is that the Red Cross seems to be dramatically misrepresenting how much they accomplished with the money they raised.

>Maybe this periodist just didn't knew how to use google:

Um... did you even read the article or were you too busy being smug?

Re: In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

#66

Post by maxerickson »

RobertoG wrote: post #58
jacquesm wrote: post #3

I stopped giving to 'big charities' twenty years ago and since then have only helped people locally where I can see what happens to the money. That's a real pity because of course on a relative scale those are probably much less in need than the people in Haiti (and Nepal and other areas devastated by natural disasters). But the red cross - once a paragon of virtue - and a number of other big time charities that were…

Maybe is time for them to modernize of close. I think that Internet make possible new models of charities. A donation can be, at the same time, not local and very personalized. I would like to recommend watsi: https://watsi.org/ You can donate to concrete people and, they give you an accurate report, after the fact, of what happened. I think we need more charities like them. Maybe something with education? Disclaimer…

I wonder what it would take to close down the ARC, it is chartered by the US government as a "Treaty Obligation Organization":

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/36/subtitle-III

Re: In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

#68

Post by unics »

chkuendig wrote: post #39

I just finished reading The Big Truck That Went By [1] by Jonathan Katz. It's an amazing account on what happened after the earthquake has hit and why most development help didn't have the impact we had hoped for. One of the reason he touches is that emergency relief groups like the Red Cross (and other, e.g. MSF) aren't setup to do the nation-building Haiti actually needed, but for more rapid and short term support…

Some good points that I've never considered. It seems some basic needs aren't always food, clothing, shelter in all disasters. Communication is key and clearly lacking in Haiti's case.

Re: In Search of the Red Cross' $500M in Haiti Relief

#69

Post by justinpropub »

lucb1e wrote: post #19

TL;DR (the informational bits): > First the Red Cross took a customary administrative cut, then the charities that received the money took their own fees. And then, according to the Red Cross' records, the charity took out an additional amount to pay for what it calls the "program costs incurred in managing" these third-party projects. > In one of the programs reviewed by NPR and ProPublica, these costs ate up a thir…

Hi -- I'm Justin Elliott, one of the reporters on the piece, with Laura Sullivan of NPR. FWIW you should take a look at the ProPublica version of the story -- we get more into the numbers, and link to various documents: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...

To answer your question specifically about the neighborhood of Campeche: Zero houses have been built there by the Red Cross.

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